PAST & PRESENT
THE GENESIS OF GIVING BLACK BY THE COMMUNITY, FOR THE COMMUNITY Decimated during the war, the Hampton Roads Black population exploded as thousands flocked to the area in search of loved ones, relief and opportunity. Existing channels of relief were overwhelmed and often denied to Black citizens who continued to look toward their churches, organizations, and each other for relief. Black giving continued through benevolent societies and mutual aid groups. Two Black settlements quickly formed in Hampton Roads, one near Fort Monroe and the other in York County, as Blacks sought assistance and social services. Both settlements attracted formerly enslaved and freed Blacks from the countryside. Hampton Roads, specifically Fort Monroe, represented a beacon of hope and freedom for enslaved Blacks during the war. The fort’s commander, General Benjamin Butler, declared that slaves who reached Fort Monroe were “contraband” and free inside the fort. As word spread, thousands of free and newly freed Blacks flocked to Hampton Roads seeking shelter, food, relief and assistance in finding loved ones. In 1863, Black philanthropist and educator Mary Peake reportedly gave the first southern reading of the Emancipation Proclamation under the Emancipation Oak Tree on
present day Hampton University’s campus. In the Yorktown settlement, over 12,000 Blacks lived in a twenty-block area that included a church, schools, and a cemetery.20 Black women of Hampton Roads played significant leadership roles in early Black giving. Portsmouth native Ida Barbour, an early Ida Barbour. childhood advocate and Black Source: The New Journal and Guide philanthropist, established the first day care in Virginia. Barbour earned a teaching degree in Philadelphia, then returned to her hometown in 1898 to work as a teacher in the school she attended as a child. After a neighbor died, Ida and her elderly mother cared for her neighbor’s orphaned children and then began caring for the children of working-class Black mothers. Barbour’s sewing circle, “The Needle Guild of America,” raised funds to support her by holding bazaars and selling “dinners, furniture (and) jewelry.” Barbour “never said no to a child” and augmented her childcare work with her modest teaching salary. Through her vision and leadership, Barbour and other Black women established the Miller Day
MARY KELSEY PEAKE Mary Kelsey Peake attended schools in Philadelphia, but returned to Norfolk to create a secret school in the First Baptist Church. She also founded the Daughters of Zion, a benevolent group that aimed to assist the vulnerable. After marriage and a move to Hampton, Peake established a second secret school where Blacks were taught how to read. After the Civil War, she was hired by the American Missionary Association as one of the first teachers in Hampton. Peake was not paid for her effort, believing her “compensation was in doing good deeds.”21 Source: Hampton University Archives
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